Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side.
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Exploring the Universe
with Andrew Fraknoi
News of a PBS TV program on how first contact with an alien civilization might happen & a link to my latest science-fiction story on the same topic.
January 7, 2023
It's the Winter Solstice, when we experience the shortest day and longest night.
December 20, 2022
Astronomers working with the James Webb Space Telescope have just identified the most distant galaxy ever observed by human eyes. This galaxy (seen as a red dot in our image in the very center of inset box #2) is so far away that the infrared waves we see left the baby galaxy just 350 million years after the Big Bang. That’s looking back through 91% of the time that …
December 3, 2022
One of strongest hopes astronomers have for the James Webb Space Telescope is that it will reveal to us many of the details of how stars are born. Because a baby star and the “nursery” of gas and dust around it are just warming up, we can learn a lot more from its infrared rays (heat rays) than from visible light. Here we see an infrared view of part …
November 20, 2022
There will be a total eclipse of the Moon visible from all of North America on the morning of Nov. 8th.
October 24, 2022
An image combining information from the Webb and Hubble telescopes shows a pair of contrasting galaxies and holds promise for future studies.
October 9, 2022
Astronomers working with the James Webb Space Telescope recently unveiled a beautiful new image of one of the largest and most impressive regions of star formation known — the Tarantula Nebula (sometimes also called the 30 Doradus nebula after an old catalog designation.) In visible-light images, the nebula’s shape somewhat resembles the legs of a giant tarantula. This spectacular infrared image is actually a mosaic constructed of a number …
September 14, 2022
The giant planet Jupiter is shown in remarkable detail from the giant James Webb Space Telescope. The powerful northern and southern lights are easily seen in this image.
August 24, 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope has taken an intriguing image of a cosmic accident victim — a large galaxy that was hit directly in its center by a smaller neighbor. Called the Cartwheel Galaxy because of its appearance, this distant grouping of billions of stars was hit by a cosmic bullet — small spiral galaxy that pushed right through it hundreds of millions of years ago. (The “bullet” galaxy …
August 2, 2022
Soon after the scientists working with the Webb telescope released their gorgeous images for public consumption, they also started making available some of the images that were gathered as engineers checked the instruments and systems aboard the spacecraft that is the telescope. It turns out, one of set of these images held a pleasant surprise. Few people know that the planet Saturn is not the only world with a …
July 26, 2022
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